2015-08-02T20:25:46ZDigitized health promotion: personal responsibility for health in the Web 2.0 erahttp://hdl.handle.net/2123/9190
Title: Digitized health promotion: personal responsibility for health in the Web 2.0 era
Authors: Lupton, Deborah
Abstract: The new apparatus of what is often termed ‘digital health’ (and also ‘Health 2.0’, ‘Medicine 2.0’, eHealth’ or ‘mHealth’), a conglomeration of new digital technologies addressed at delivering healthcare, preventive medicine and health promotion, has facilitated a focus on measuring and monitoring the functions and activities of lay people’s bodies and encouraging self-care among patients with chronic diseases. It is upon this new approach to identifying and preventing ill health and disease that this working paper focuses. While the digital health approach to the body and health spans the arc from patient care to public health surveillance techniques, the discussion here largely is directed at the implications for the digital health ‘revolution’ in relation to the practice of health promotion; or what I refer to as ‘digitized health promotion’. It is argued that despite concerted efforts on the part of those advocating for a less individualistic approach to health promotion since the 1970s and drawing attention to the social determinants of health, digital health technologies as they are advocated for promoting health represent a renewed focus on personal responsibility for health. In the discourses and practices of digitized health promotion, health risks have become increasingly individualized and viewed as manageable and controllable as long as lay people adopt the appropriate technologies to engage in self-monitoring and self-care. With the advent of the big data produced by digital technologies and the use of sophisticated algorithms to manipulate these data, it has become ever more convenient to focus attention on personal responsibility for health states. The digitalized health promotion phenomenon, therefore, operates as one dimension of the progressive withdrawal of the state in many developed countries from attempting to challenge the social and economic factors causing ill health and disease and efforts to promote social justice.2013-06-13T00:00:00ZRevolting Bodies: the Pedagogy of Disgust in Public Health Campaignshttp://hdl.handle.net/2123/9110
Title: Revolting Bodies: the Pedagogy of Disgust in Public Health Campaigns
Authors: Lupton, Deborah
Abstract: The developers of public health campaigns have often attempted to elicit the emotion of disgust to persuade members of their target audiences to change their behaviour in the interests of their health. This article identifies and analyses the dominant types of disgust that were employed in a collection of public health campaign texts. It was found that ‘animal reminder’ disgust, ‘liminality’ disgust, ‘matter out of place’ disgust and ‘moral’ disgust were all used in various ways in the campaign materials examined. The implications for how the human body, health and illness are conceptualised and understood and the moral meanings that are related to disgust responses are discussed. It is argued that the use of disgust in public health campaigns has serious political and ethical implications. Advocates of using such tactics should be aware of the challenge they pose to human dignity and their perpetuation of the Self and Other binary opposition that marginalises and stigmatises already disadvantaged individuals and social group.2013-05-26T00:00:00ZThe Commodification of Patient Opinion: the Digital Patient Experience Economy in the Age of Big Datahttp://hdl.handle.net/2123/9063
Title: The Commodification of Patient Opinion: the Digital Patient Experience Economy in the Age of Big Data
Authors: Lupton, Deborah
Abstract: As part of the digital health phenomenon, a plethora of interactive digital platforms have been established in recent years to elicit lay people’s experiences of illness and healthcare. The function of these platforms, as expressed on the main pages of their websites, is to provide the tools and forums whereby patients and caregivers, and in some cases medical practitioners, can share their experiences with others, benefit from the support and knowledge of other contributors and contribute to large aggregated data archives as part of developing better medical treatments and services and conducting medical research. However what may not always be readily apparent to the users of these platforms are the growing commercial uses by many of the platforms’ owners of the archives of the data they contribute. This article examines this phenomenon of what I term ‘the digital patient experience economy’. In so doing I discuss such aspects as prosumption, the phenomena of big data and metric assemblages, the discourse and ethic of sharing and the commercialisation of affective labour via such platforms. I argue that via these online platforms patients’ opinions and experiences may be expressed in more diverse and accessible forums than ever before, but simultaneously they have become exploited in novel ways.2013-05-04T00:00:00ZConfiguring maternal, preborn and infant embodimenthttp://hdl.handle.net/2123/8363
Title: Configuring maternal, preborn and infant embodiment
Authors: Lupton, Deborah
Abstract: A growing literature on the biopolitics of contemporary maternity and on risk society, individualisation and parenting has demonstrated the increasing emphasis that has been placed upon pregnant women and mothers to take responsibility for the health and welfare of their children. The ideal female ‘reproductive citizen’ is expected to place her children’s health and wellbeing above her own needs and desires. Here the subject positions of the ‘good mother’ and the ‘responsible citizen’ as they are produced through the discourses and practices of neoliberalism intertwine. This paper looks at the convergence of various influential discourses, images, practices and technologies in configuring maternal, preborn and infant bodies in certain ways in the context of neoliberalism. These include such factors as the growing importance of the concept of risk in relation to preborn and infant wellbeing, the extension of infant identity back into preborn bodies, the emergence of the concepts of the foetal and embryonic (and even the preconceived embryonic) citizen, the precious child and intensive parenting and the symbolic concepts of permeability, purity and danger and Self and Other as they relate to maternal, infant and preborn embodiment.2012-05-18T00:00:00Z'I'm Always on the Lookout for What Could be Going Wrong': Mothers' Concepts and Experiences of Health and Illness in Their Young Childrenhttp://hdl.handle.net/2123/8351
Title: 'I'm Always on the Lookout for What Could be Going Wrong': Mothers' Concepts and Experiences of Health and Illness in Their Young Children
Authors: Lupton, Deborah
Abstract: Mothers in contemporary western societies are expected to adhere to the principles of intensive parenting, spending a great deal of time and effort caring for their children, protecting them from risks and promoting their health, development and wellbeing. This paper draws upon research involving indepth interviews with 60 mothers of infants and young children living in Sydney. The discussion focuses in detail on three major topics discussed in the interviews: how the interviewees conceptualised good health and illness in their children; the role of diet and physical exercise in promoting children’s good health; and space, physical safety and bad influences. The study found that the interviewees reported that they ‘read the signs’ of their children’s bodies and had to ‘know’ their bodies intimately in order to do so. They also interpreted the signals of their own bodies – their ‘gut instincts’ – as part of the process of maintaining careful surveillance of their children’s health state. They represented diet and physical exercise as the most important dimensions of promoting their children’s health, and were very concerned about the risk of obesity in their children. Notions of space and judgements about the bodies within these spaces were also important to some of the women’s concepts of protecting their children’s health and wellbeing.2012-05-15T00:00:00Z